Stella Civelli, Sant’Anna School PhD student in Emerging Digital Technologies at the TeCIP Institute, received two international awards – the Photonics and Electromagnetics Research Symposium (PIERS) “Best student Paper Award" and the Rank Prize Funds “Best contributed paper”, for her substantial contribution to the field of Optoelectronics technology.

In Toyama – Japan, awards and prizes were given to the Photonics and Electromagnetics Research Symposium (sponsored by the Electromagnetics Academy) best presentations in several categories. Stella Civelli presented her work "Improved detection strategies for nonlinear frequency-division mutiplexing" co-authored by E. Forestieri and M. Secondini for the Optics and Photonics category.

The second award from the Rank Prize Funds, a charitable organisation in the UK established in February 1972, to recognize excellence in nutrition and optoelectronics research fields, was given during the Challenges to Meeting Demand Capacity on Long-Haul Optical Fibre Links symposium in Grasmere – Cumbria. The Optoelectronics Committee according to criteria such as research impact and originality judged 30 PhD theses. Stella Civelli won the "Best contributed paper” award.

As 95% of the digital data transmitted are carried by optical fibers communication infrastructures, the need of information-carrying capacity of these networks has increased over the past decades. As the volume of data continues to increase, current research aims to maximize the capacity of optical communications and find a new nonlinear communication technique. Stella Civelli proposed a polarization-division multiplexing (PDM) transmission scheme based on the nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT).

Cover photo: Professor Kazuya Kobayashi at the Photonics and Electromagnetics Research Symposium (PIERS) “Best student Paper Award", Japan.